Mr. Cantore, my high school health teacher, wanted to illustrate to the class that boys -- basketball players in particular -- are less flexible than girls. So he called me to the front of the classroom. And I proved his point.
I was unable to do a simple stretch, like bend over and touch my toes. Meanwhile, my female counterpart -- a swimmer, I believe -- continued with contortions that made me cringe.
Ten years later, I am no more pliable, I am still doing my part to confirm Mr. Cantore's contention. This was made painfully clear to me at a recent Pilates class at The Edge Performance & Fitness Center in Gainesville.
Pilates (pronounced puh-LAH-teez) can't really be classified a fitness fad -- its been around since the 1920s -- but it does seem to be particularly in vogue these days. It's what the stars over in Hollywood are swearing by this year, so, by golly, the rest of America is going to swear by it, too.
Celebrities such as Madonna, Sharon Stone and Julia Roberts have been linked to Pilates. I've always wanted to be linked, in one way or another, to Julia, so I thought I'd give Pilates a try.
Pilates is a body conditioning methodology intended to develop flexibility and strength without building bulk. The result, ideally, is a longer, leaner you.
"I call this my 'strengthen and lengthen' class," said Karen Smith, The Edge's Pilates instructor.
The practice of Pilates first gained popularity with professional dancers. Its focus on proper breathing, good posture and intense concentration helped them in their craft.
Pilates, however, was originally intended to rehabilitate injured soldiers during World War I. Joseph Pilates, the technique's creator, rigged hospital beds with springs at a British internment camp and led the patients through his regimen.
Today, some instructors still use machines and apparatus designed after Pilates' first rudimentary contraptions. I've only seen them in pictures. They are odd-looking instruments, the type you'd expect to find in the laboratory of a mad scientist.
The Edge offers mat-based Pilates classes -- no machines -- and they take place in the center's well-lit aerobics room -- no mad scientists.
Smith has offered the class since the middle of the summer. I was her second male student, and if I go back, I will be her first male student to last longer than one session.
"We should have a lot of guys in here," Smith said. "It would be good for them."
I had my doubts, I must admit. I wasn't expecting to be sore after the class, but I was. I wasn't expecting to sweat, but I did.
Not too sore, however. Not too much sweat, either.
"I hate to say it's easy, because it's not easy," said my classmate Tracy Renaud, 32, of Cleveland. "But any fitness level can do it and get something out of it. You can make it as hard or as easy as you want."
For nearly an hour, Smith led us through a series of movements designed to both stretch and strengthen. There are no weights; your own body provides the resistance. My inelastic body resisted more during some exercises than others.
Smith constantly reminded the class to breathe -- for every motion, there is an inhale or an exhale -- and to "push your navel toward your spine."
She also mentioned, again and again, "the core." Every person must find "their center," Smith said. Every movement flows out from there.
It was a workout, but it was relaxing.
"It makes you feel good when you're through. It really does," said 68-year-old regular Jan Evans, of Flowery Branch. "It's a lot of stretching and balance and strength. As you get older, you need all of those things. And it's more upbeat than yoga."
I believe we were about three-quarters of the way through our class when it happened: A bead of sweat rolled down my forehead and off the tip of my nose.
Pilates, at times, can be deceivingly difficult.
"This ain't no sissy stuff, is it?" Smith said in my direction.
I shook my head in response -- and some more of my sweat rolled to the floor.
Afterwards, Smith suggested that I come again, that I break through that Pilates gender gap.
"Bring a friend," she said. "Tell the guys it's not as bad as they think."
No guys, it's not. And there's always the chance that Julia Roberts might end up sitting on the mat beside you.
"I just can't believe that anybody would do that to anybody," Jim Collins said to me, staring at the road in pained puzzlement. "I don't care who they are. That's just beyond my comprehension."
The same conversation, I'm sure, was likely going on in pickup trucks across the country last Thursday. America was only two days removed from terror; what was once unthinkable was now all there was to think about.
And I was sick of it. I was sick of the images I saw over and over again on CNN. I was sick of wondering whether all of my friends were still alive.
I was quite thankful, then, to see Jim Collins' truck pull up in front of my house on Thursday. He was there to take me away from it all -- to a place where my cell phone didn't receive a signal, a place without televisions or terrorists.
Of course, the place we were headed is known to have its share of wild bears. And it was our intention to find them.
This was new for me. I have spent much of my life trying to avoid contact with such creatures. And, so far, I have been rather successful.
Now I was planning on sneaking up on them?
I don't normally dress in full fatigues, so the answer was yes. This is Collins' hobby. He finds wild bears. He videotapes them. Then he goes home -- which, to me, is the most important aspect of the adventure.
When Collins and I arrived at our White County stalking grounds -- the exact location of which Collins requested that I not reveal -- he showed me where he hides the keys to his truck.
"In case I get ate," Collins said with a half-smile. I considered swiping the keys, and the truck, right then.
In his 10 years tracking bears in the wild, Collins admits he has had a habit of getting "too close." Collins also claims, however, he has never had a "close call."
Although, his definition of "close call" differs greatly from mine.
Collins has been face-to-face with bears. He's been encircled by them. He's been snorted and snarled at, too.
"That's not a close call?" I asked. "What are you thinking at moments like that?"
"I'm thinking I hope to hell that when he goes, he goes the other way," Collins, 39, said.
"You're not scared that he won't go the other way?"
"There's always a sense of fear. But it's more excitement: just being that close to something that you know, if he wanted to, could tear you up."
Collins would rather that didn't happen to him. So he tries to be careful.
"Bears can't see good at all," Collins said.
But their noses work nicely. So Collins likes to enter the woods "clean" -- virtually no trace of human scent on him -- and camouflaged.
If the bear doesn't know he's there, there's no reason to be scared. Collins usually goes unnoticed, even though he's just a few feet away.
This whole hobby started by accident. Collins was walking through the woods scouting for deer with his camcorder. He saw a bear in the distance. He decided to record it.
Soon, the bear was no longer in the distance -- it was only 15 feet away. Collins realized this when he lowered the camera from his face. The lens, he learned, has a tendency to make things -- like bears, for example -- appear farther away than they actually are. Collins would have liked to have learned this under safer circumstances.
"The picture got somewhat shaky after that," Collins said.
But Collins kept recording -- on that day, and the others that would follow. For the past 10 years, Collins and his camera have focused in on several hundred black bears in the mountains of North Georgia. He has 15 tapes, brimming with bear.
"You find them out there in their home territory, and they are so at ease," Collins said. "It's not like a deer or a turkey. They are just so calm once you get back in the woods a ways. It's just like being in their living room."
Speaking of living rooms, Collins has a bear -- a big one -- in his. He killed a 400-pound monster with his compound bow in 1997. At the time, it was the second-largest bear ever killed in Georgia. He ate the meat -- "delicious," he said -- and had the bear stuffed.
"I've got my house decorated around that bear," admitted Collins, who, it should be noted here, lives alone.
The 400-pounder was Collins' trophy, the kill of a lifetime. He hasn't shot at a bear since.
"Right now," Collins said, "I like hunting with my camera. I really don't care about killing another one."
We walked through the woods for hours. Collins slung his camcorder -- which, like us, was fully camouflaged -- over his shoulder and led the way.
Collins calls this "creeping," not hiking. We tiptoed between the trees, stepping on rocks instead of leaves whenever possible.
Collins, with his compass, kept track of the wind, as well. If it's blowing at your back, it's time for you to move. And if you're smelling too much like a human, it's time to spray a little "human scent neutralizer" on your clothes.
Collins was constantly looking for signs of bear. He scoured the ground for tracks and droppings. We'd stop and sit a while near their favorite feeding areas: white oaks, and fields of millet, sorghum, clover and pokeweed. Collins has been known to taste acorns himself, and target trees with the sweetest nuts.
"This place is full of good animals," Collins said. He then added, "But there's too many people tracks."
Our talk eventually shifted to World Trade Centers and terrorists. It was obviously on our minds.
"You know, with all this going on, I feel kind of silly sitting here waiting for a bear," Collins said.
We waited until dark. The bears never came. But I didn't feel silly.
I'd rather look at an empty field in the forest than New York City on fire any day.
The drive from Smyrna to Rockmart was nothing special. I spent the first half of it waiting for Atlanta to ease its grip on the greenbelt. I spent the second half eager to remove my bicycle from the back of my friend's pickup truck.
I traveled to this countrified corner of Northwest Georgia with one goal in mind: to ride the Silver Comet Trail — all 37.47 miles of it — from Rockmart to Smyrna. I realized early on that such a plan was going to include much more time in automobiles than one usually associates with pedaling a bike.
First I had to drive from Gainesville to Smyrna, where I met up with my friend Richmond. We dropped my car there and took his truck to Rockmart. Three hours later, upon our return to Smyrna, we got back in my car to head back to Rockmart and Richmond's truck. From there, I embarked on the 90-minute drive back to Gainesville.
And I thought riding bicycles was supposed to conserve natural resources.
The Silver Comet Trail, however, proved to be worth both the time and the petroleum. It's a concrete and macadam path to the past — and no motors are allowed.
Built on an abandoned railroad right-of-way, the Silver Comet Trail is named after the luxury passenger train that roared along the route from 1947 to 1969 — until the jet airplane and the family car forced it out of business.
The Silver Comet ran from New York City to Birmingham, Ala. In 1992, the Georgia Department of Transportation purchased 57 miles of the right-of-way — from Smyrna to the Alabama border — for more than $7 million dollars. At the time, the DOT envisioned the land as a nice corridor for a commuter railway should another metro Atlanta airport be built to the northwest.
That day could still come, I suppose. But until then, thanks to the efforts and funds of entities both public and private, the Silver Comet Trail stands as Georgia's most ambitious rails-to-trails project to date. Construction began in July 1998 and is expected to be finished by December 2002.
When completed, the trail will stretch to the Alabama border, where it will connect with the Chief Ladiga Trail, and provide a continuous 101-mile path from Atlanta to Anniston, Ala.
But, right now, 37 miles is what we have to work with. And, believe me, that is enough to work up a pretty good sweat.
You can make the Silver Comet Trail — which is open to cyclists, skaters, runners, walkers, wheelchairs, strollers, dogs and, on certain sections, horses — as easy or as difficult as you'd like. It never rises or falls by a grade of greater than 2 percent. It is flat concrete in Polk and Paulding counties and flat asphalt in Cobb County.
It's a smooth ride, to be sure. And you don't have to do it all at once like we did. Most folks — perhaps in an effort to conserve both time and fuel — choose one of the 14 parking and access sites along the trail, and begin and end their journeys at the same spot.
But I wanted to see the whole thing. And that's what we did.
If automobiles have ever made you and your bicycle feel a little unwelcome in your quest to "share the road" (that's what the signs say, right?), the etiquette displayed among bikers on the Silver Comet Trail will make you feel as though you've walked onto the set of your own personal Truman Show.
There are smiles and nods for everyone, and plenty of room to ride side by side.
When we set off from Rockmart, however, the smiles and nods were few and far between — so, too, were the people. Unlike the parking lot in Smyrna, which was overflowing on this Saturday morning, Rockmart seemed downright deserted. It made for a peaceful beginning.
It should come as no surprise that the sections of the Silver Comet still out of Atlanta's reach are the most picturesque, and that the people you encounter on these outlying miles are the most colorful (in terms of character, not clothing — the Cobb County folks clad in fluorescent spandex take the prize there).
There was one elderly man who didn't let the 90-degree temperature, or the fact that it was Saturday, stop him from wearing his Sunday best. He had wrinkles on his face and a fedora on his head. Pee Wee Herman would have envied his mode of transportation.
Then, at the 800-foot-long tunnel that cuts a hole in Brushy Mountain, we encountered a gentleman wearing an engineer's cap. As he guided his bicycle into the darkness, he blew repeatedly into a wooden train whistle. It filled up the tunnel — known for its aesthetics and its acoustics — rather nicely.
For every tunnel there was a trestle. The one at Pumpkinvine Creek is 126 feet high and 750 feet long. The water roared beneath us, and I had trouble keeping my eyes focused forward.
Near Ma White's Bottomland, closer to Rockmart, the path is at its most pastoral. Large rolls of hay dot the rolling green fields. So do cows. A historical marker tells the story of a Civil War cannonball that nearly made Ma White Ma Dead.
It was easy to imagine the Silver Comet trucking along, through tunnels, over trestles, and between narrow walls of trees and stone.
I wondered if the kudzu vine so dominated the landscape back then. But you know, for all of its predacious predilections, kudzu has a rather sweet-smelling aroma. The same can't be said for suburban sprawl.
The ride was relaxing. We easily fell into a rhythm.
But the Cobb County section has a way of causing such rhythms to be interrupted. There are more roads to cross. More people to pass.
And when we arrived again at the still-stuffed Smyrna parking lot, part of me wanted to turn my bike right around and ride 37 more miles back to Rockmart.
I wasn't looking forward to spending the next two-and-a-half hours in my car.